The stream and Ex-pathway to boko haram insurgents The stream and Ex-pathway to boko haram insurgents In February 2009, I was at a motor park in Maraba, a satellite of the Nigerian capital Abuja, looking for motorcyclists wearing dried vegetables on their heads. The Nigerian Police Force had recently tightened laws requiring drivers and passengers of motorcycles to wear helmets. In the case of motorcycle taxis – known as achabas in northern Nigeria – drivers would now have to provide helmets for their passengers. There was an uproar. Everyone knew that taking a trip on an achaba could be a dangerous thing; the drivers had a reputation for recklessness. But many Nigerians did not like the new rules. Above all, the law gave the police an opportunity for extortion. One motorcycle taxi driver told me it was going to cost him 10,000 naira (around £40) to buy two helmets. As he made between 300 and 400 naira per day (less than £2), there was no way he could afford to obey the new law. Everyone knew what would happen. The police would set up flying checkpoints, near markets, motor parks and busy thoroughfares. They would swoop down on motorcyclists, flailing sticks and canes as the riders madly accelerated out of their traps. People who drive achabas are close to the bottom of society. They are men (and only men) without much formal education, often without any other marketable skill. Many sleep rough, under bridges or awnings, some sleep on their motorcycles, guarding their source of income. Their passengers are also mostly poor. The vast number of achabas on the roads is a symptom of Nigeria’s economic problems. The new helmet law was, in the minds of most, just another squeeze on people already in perilous circumstances. When the regulations came into force, something strange happened. As hardly anyone had helmets to wear, achaba drivers took to the streets in all manner of improvised headgear. There were pictures in the press of people wearing paint cans and buckets; but best of all were riders wearing hollowed-out watermelons and calabash bowls – rustic utensils made out of dried gourds that, before the advent of plastic, were ubiquitous as water vessels. These achaba drivers had stood up against barely disguised official extortion. Their resistance was characteristically subversive. But most Nigerians simply added the new legislation to the long list of things that made their lives difficult – then they prayed, hoped the police would quickly lose interest and carried on as normal. In one part of the country, however, this cat-and-mouse game between police and Nigerian motorists would have much more serious consequences. In Maiduguri, the capital of the north-eastern Borno state, enforcement of the helmet law caused an incident that would spark a violent conflict between the police and members of a radical Islamist sect that was then unknown to the world. This, in turn, would pitch Nigeria into war. In one part of the country this cat-and-mouse game between police and Nigerian motorists would have serious consequences Two years later, I watched as a slight young man entered the office of Maiduguri’s Special Armed Robbery Squad. The building is known locally as “The Crack”, ostensibly because it houses the elite police force. It is also a place from where, once a person falls in, they might never emerge. The young man, whose name was Mohammed Zakariyya, was led inside by two plainclothes officers. He had been arrested a few days before, after the car he was driving was stopped at a police checkpoint. He was thin and looked to be barely more than a teenager. His long pink, kaftan-like shirt was dirty and flecked with small spots of dried blood. “They discovered the weapons we had hidden underneath the seat,” Zakariyya told me and my fellow BBC journalist, Abdullahi Kaura Abubakar. When his companion was ordered out of the vehicle to let the police search it, he tried to drive off. The Police Mobile Force officers opened fire, killing him. (The red hatchback, now full of holes, sat in the yard of the Borno police headquarters.) Zakariyya said that he had been on three arms smuggling missions. Each time, he and his accomplices drove 120km out of Maiduguri to meet a man who ferried weapons in a canoe downriver from the mountainous border with Cameroon. Each time, he brought them half-a-dozen AK-47s and a handful of boxes of ammunition. They loaded the car, then Zakariyya drove it through Maiduguri to a large house in the suburbs of Damaturu, the capital of the neighbouring state of Yobe. The men he was working for had approached Zakariyya at the end of 2010 while he was selling shoes and phone chargers. “They used to preach in the open, so everyone was aware of who they were,” he said. Weapons seized from Boko Haram by the Nigerian military. “They” were members of the hardline Islamist sect that had established itself between 2005 and 2009 at a compound in Maiduguri’s Railway district. Known as Boko Haram, which translates as “Western education is forbidden”, the group had gradually brought more and more people under its influence. The man we had come to Maiduguri to speak with was a member who called himself Abu Dujana his nom de guerre was taken from one of the companions of the prophet Muhammad. He described the atmosphere of the sect’s Maiduguri headquarters in cult-like terms. The pace of life inside was dictated by the charismatic leader Mohammed Yusuf, who set and enforced strict standards of religious practice. “Yes, I lived there,” Abu Dujana said proudly. “There wasn’t a mosque like this in the whole of the country, where you could go and attain as much knowledge.” On 20 February 2009, members of the sect were travelling to a funeral in a large group. The convoy was made up of many motorbikes, and the police stopped them. The police were part of a state-wide task force, named Operation Flush and set up in 2005 to combat political thugs who had run amok in elections two years before. The dispute between the group and the police about their refusal to wear helmets became heated. Some reports of the exchange say that the police shot first, others that a member of the group disarmed a policeman and tried to use his weapon on the other police officers. In any case, the police opened fire, and several people in the travelling funeral party were killed and wounded. This was not the first time that Operation Flush had crossed paths with Boko Haram, and the group’s leadership had already concluded that the purpose of the Joint Task Force was to harass them directly. In the weeks following this encounter, Yusuf made a series of speeches, circulated widely on tapes and DVDs and over Bluetooth connections, calling on Muslims to prepare to “come to Jihad”. This, he said, included “material preparation such as learning shooting, buying rifles and bombs, as well as training the Islamic Soldiers to fight the infidels. You should sacrifice your souls, your homes, your cars and your motorcycles for the sake of Allah. Yusuf also had a large farm in Bauchi state, which he used as a base. The state government responded to these speeches by ordering the police to raid the farm, capturing hundreds of Boko Haram members and killing several more. The police laid siege to the sect’s headquarters in the Ibn Taymiyyah mosque compound in Maiduguri. “They did not engage us fully, but tried to provoke us, driving along the side of the compound in a jeep,” Dujana told me. “We waited until we had our chance and then we took it.” When they saw the state’s forces had pulled back and commenced shooting at them from a distance, the men inside armed themselves and broke out of the compound. Dujana said they split into groups – he led one detachment, which roamed the city looking for military and police units to attack. For four days Boko Haram rampaged through the streets of Maiduguri. As well as killing police and soldiers, they slaughtered scores of civilians who were caught out in the open, slitting their throats like animals. As the authorities re-established control of the town, Mohammed Yusuf was captured by the military. He was interrogated in front of journalists who filmed it with their phones. He was then handed over to the police. Within minutes, Yusuf was dead – shot, the police said, while trying to escape. Nobody believed this. Yusuf’s bullet-ridden body was then displayed to journalists, who took pictures. This was just the beginning of a tide of violence that has left thousands of people dead and at least 1.5 million people displaced from their homes. Seven years after Yusuf’s killing, the war between Boko Haram and the Nigerian state has changed and developed. From late 2014 to early 2015, the sect controlled an estimated 70% of Borno state – the authorities, meanwhile, seemed incapable of dislodging it. After his election in 2015, President Muhammadu Buhari of the All Progressives Congress party tried to reinvigorate the military leadership by replacing a number of top generals. This, he hoped, would bolster the state’s response to Boko Haram. By August 2015, the military had reversed many of the group’s gains and pushed it back to more remote areas. But the war is by no means finished In November, during attacks 48 hours apart, suicide bombers killed scores in the eastern city of Yola and Kano in the north, targets that lie hundreds of miles apart. These attacks show the extent of the group’s reach, even outside the area it once controlled. There have been continual, under-reported, skirmishes in the border regions of north-east Nigeria. Just last Friday, on 29 January, the group launched an attack on Dalori, a small town close to Maiduguri. As many as 80 people were killed. Witnesses said they heard the screams of dying children as their houses burned down around them. These attacks are in spite of Buhari’s announcement in December that the war was “technically over”. Yusuf’s group did not appear out of nowhere. Even before the open war between Boko Haram and the state, it had been growing. Among its ranks were people from all levels of society, from street kids and traders, to disaffected students and wealthy businessmen. Many of the young men and women came from the University of Maiduguri, where the elite of the 1990s sent their children to be educated. The institution was famed for the hedonism of its students, who indulged in ritual displays of wealth. The young sons of the elite would compete to be “King of Campus”: the winner racked up the highest expense on parties. The “naira spray” was a particularly fashionable form of celebration, much seen during the oil boom of the 1970s: to honour a talented musician, dancer or a pretty girl, one of these wealthy young men would scatter a rain of currency that the object of their approval would then pick up off the floor. Who are Boko Haram ... and what do they want? To some, this fetishisation of money was an example of the injustice and immorality at the heart of the state. Disaffected students and university dropouts gravitated towards the youth wing of a Salafi group at a mosque in Maiduguri. Among them were the nephew of the governor of Yobe state, the son of the state secretary of Borno and five sons of a prominent businessman who had made his money through state contracts. These young men were drawn to the Salafists, who preached that such spiritual corruption was the cause of Borno’s ills. Many of them burned their university certificates when they joined. One man saw the potential of these young radicals, born into privilege. His name was Mohammed Yusuf. Yusuf had been travelling around the north-east, preaching, making contacts and winning a following since the mid-1990s. He was a charismatic speaker who had no trouble attracting an audience. His radical ideas about the infidel state of Nigeria resonated with many people. He gave fiery orations at mosques and debated with other Islamic scholars on local television and radio. According to his supporters, Yusuf was one of thousands of Almajiri children religious students who beg on the streets for a living. But by the early 2000s he had found a place as a leader of the youth wing of a Salafist group at Maiduguri’s popular Alhaji Muhammadu Ndimi mosque. Yusuf told his followers that Muslims who participated in any form of democratic system were apostates and should be killed by the faithful. The wellspring of corruption, he concluded, was the education system put in place during and after colonial rule by Christian Britain. He preached in busy towns on market days (rather than on Fridays, a breach of tradition that angered the Islamic authorities), where he picked up many followers. In the years before the 2009 uprising, observers were shocked at the extent of Yusuf’s influence, which spread deep into the border regions. Anthropologist Gerhard Müller-Kosack spent years studying a village in the Mandara mountains, near the border with Cameroon. He said the village changed “virtually overnight”. When he visited for the last time in 2008, what surprised him most were the women: “Suddenly they were there in the full covering. It was the women at the forefront of the change.” During their years in the village, Müller-Kosack and his wife had started a school. He had collected donations from friends and colleagues to buy textbooks. The last time he visited, he found the school abandoned: “All the books had been burned the young women, it was they who made a pile of them and burned them in front of the school.” From the very beginning, Yusuf was preparing his followers for conflict. Among the first generation of supporters were many ideologues willing to unleash violence on the state, innocent civilians, the Muslim establishment and anyone they declared to be unbelievers. They formed a “counter elite”, united by resentment of years of secular rule in Nigeria. These men dreamed of a sharia wonderland, and believed it would come to Nigeria through unremitting bloodshed. Before the 2009 uprising, the Salafists associated with the Ndimi mosque had already made one disastrous attempt at creating an Islamic state. In 2003, a man named Muhammad Ali, who had tired of Yusuf’s slow approach to building a movement, led a band of 200 young men and women out into the wilderness to start society anew. They ended up in the borderlands of Yobe state, near the dry river bed between Nigeria and the Republic of Niger, at a place called Kanamma. They were determined to shun the corrupt world and create a new land of Islamic purity. This group of aggressive, iconoclastic city-dwellers soon came into conflict with the people who already lived in the place they tried to settle. Indeed, conflict was what they sought. They dug defensive preparations in a wooded grove near a water source. They raided local police stations and government buildings to get weapons, and to provoke a reaction, which duly came. After a brief siege, the military overran and destroyed the camp. The group’s members were mostly wiped out. A few survivors escaped north, over the border to Niger, where some can still be found. Others slunk back to Maiduguri. The military crackdown attracted international attention because the group dubbed itself the “Nigerian Taliban”. But, at the time, the US embassy concluded that it had no links to al-Qaida. Yusuf had not joined the Kanamma uprising. Still, after the group was crushed, he went into self-imposed exile in Saudi Arabia to escape accusations that he had anything to do with it. It is thought that, while he was there, he made links with like-minded Salafi preachers and secured their support. But after a year, he was back in Maiduguri. On his return, in 2005, Yusuf began to rebuild his own community, establishing the Ibn Taymiyyah mosque and compound in the Railway district of Maiduguri on land bought with the help of his father-in-law. This location, in the heart of the state capital, was key to the group’s new incarnation. By embedding themselves in the town rather than the wilderness, the group had many more avenues for recruitment and funding. The population of Maiduguri has risen dramatically in recent years. Desertification across the north of Borno state has, over the last decade, destroyed farmland and sparked an exodus to the city. The academic Mohammed Kabir Isa of Ahmadu Bello University Zaria says: “When they come to the city in search of a livelihood, the bubble bursts, and they realise there’s nothing there. That’s when they become easy prey for militant organisations.” By the end of 2008, the group was operating like a state within a state; it had its own institutions, including a shura council to make decisions and a religious police force to enforce discipline. It had a rudimentary welfare system, offered jobs working the land it had acquired in Bauchi and even gave microfinance loans to members to start their own projects. Many used the money to buy motorcycles and worked as achaba drivers. The group also arranged marriages between members, which many of the poorest could not afford in normal life. Rather than sticking out as rebels, Yusuf and his followers could blend in with ordinary people. Yusuf was also comfortable moving between the different layers of Maiduguri society. The city has always been an important trading post for dealers in goods of all kinds – legal and otherwise. Its proximity to the borders of three countries – Cameroon, Chad, Niger – makes it an ideal hub for speculation in commodities such as fertiliser, kerosene, diesel and petrol. Maiduguri’s trading elite have made a lot of money. Some of them gravitated to Yusuf’s Salafist group in the belief that they should atone for their prosperity. The Ibn Taymiyyah mosque had been allowed to function thanks to a deal that Yusuf had struck with the government. The agreement between the state deputy governor and Yusuf had been brokered in Saudi Arabia by a leading Salafist sheikh. Yusuf promised that he had nothing to do with the separatist group in Kanamma and would never again preach violent jihad. But in the following years, he ignored this pledge and was picked up by the security services several times, only to be swiftly released. The journalist who first reported on Yusuf’s sect believes that at least at this early stage its leader enjoyed high-level backing from the governor of Borno, Ali Modu Sherif. Ahmed Salkida, a reporter for the Daily Trust, one of the few Nigerian papers that focus on the north, wrote extensively about the group in the years before 2009. He says that despite his professed loathing of politics, Yusuf made alliances and found common ground with Sherif. Both men had much to gain from cooperation. Yusuf wanted the guarantees of a stronger sharia, a commitment to a strict line on God’s divine law; Sherif wanted to be re-elected. Sherif denies any such arrangement or involvement with the sect. Questions still hang over the speed with which Yusuf was dispatched, and who exactly was served by his silencing In public, the two men had an antagonistic relationship. Yusuf had called Sherif an “infidel” and demanded his death. Sherif, however, knew that it would have been unwise to fight Yusuf. Instead, he courted him, providing a lucrative position in the state religious affairs ministry to one of Boko Haram’s most zealous members, a man named Buji Foi. Salkida told me that until the final days before the uprising, Yusuf still believed that a deal could be done with the state, and that Sherif would come around to Boko Haram’s uncompromising position. But by that stage Sherif had been backed into a corner. He could no longer protect Yusuf, who was handed over to the police, and quickly executed. Questions still hang over the speed with which Yusuf was dispatched, and who exactly was served by his silencing. After Yusuf’s death, his lieutenants went into hiding, but they were sustained by their loyalty to his vision. Under the leadership of Abubakar Shekau, who had been Yusuf’s second-in-command, Boko Haram’s priority was revenge. The group’s first targets were the police, who were attacked at their own checkpoints and robbed of their weapons. Higher-ranking officers were assassinated in their homes, as were local politicians and traditional rulers. After the uprising, the authorities had demanded that traditional leaders help them identify members of Boko Haram, who were then summarily executed, and their property given to the informants as reward. Now the group came back to murder those who had betrayed them, robbing them of what they called the “spoils of war” wealth that belonged to the jihadi fighters. In June 2011, under cover of darkness, Mohammed Manga, a 35-year-old commercial driver, set out from a camp near Maiduguri for the capital. In his car was an explosive device prepared by either al-Qaida in the Islamic Mahgreb, which was then in camps in the Sahara, or al-Shabaab in Somalia. He drove into the police headquarters, past the sentries and up to the front door, in the middle of a crowd. When he detonated the bomb, five were killed and more than 100 injured. A spokesman for Boko Haram said that Manga had left his widow and five children a considerable inheritance. A photograph sent to journalists showed him smiling and waving as he got into the car, holding an AK-47. “He was calm and never showed fear,” the group’s spokesman told Salkida. He added that everyone was envious of Manga, “wishing it was their chance to act and gain entry into paradise” Boko Haram followed up this mission a few weeks later, in August 2011, by detonating a car packed with explosives in the driveway of the United Nations building in Abuja. At least 21 people were killed and scores wounded. The group unleashed a bombing campaign in Maiduguri, Jos, Kaduna and the capital, and devastating coordinated strikes against the security services in Kano. It attacked churches, universities and schools, bus stations and markets, killing thousands. Within a few years, between 2011 and 2014, Boko Haram had gone from the tattered remnants of a radical sect, to a fully fledged terrorist group. As it grew in power, subsuming whole towns by force, the group attracted more and more followers. Bands of armed robbers joined to exploit the chaos it left behind. Others joined to settle ancient scores against rival ethnic religious groups, mostly over land. Others were grabbed off the streets and forced into service Zakariyya, the young prisoner I met in 2011, had been coerced into joining Boko Haram. In the office of the Special Armed Robbery Squad in Maiduguri, my colleague, Abdullahi Kaura, and I listened as he finished his account. As a boy, Zakariyya was brought up by his grandmother. His father was not around while he was growing up, and for a great part of his youth, neither was his mother. After his parents divorced, she had married a man who wanted nothing to do with him. After some time, Zakariyya said, his mother returned. She came back with some money, but when that ran out, the family did not have enough for him to continue to attend school. His mother had other, younger, children to care for. He left school with no qualifications and went out hawking. Selling shoes and phone accessories, he was able to take home between 2,000 or 3,000 naira a week (£10). Now 22, he said that he had two wives, and two children. He was struggling to feed his family when the men from Boko Haram offered to pay him to smuggle weapons. “They promised me 200,000 naira,” he said, “but on the first trip they only paid me 70,000 and on the second trip they gave me only 40,000. I was never in favour of their ideology. They threatened me and said that now I knew what they were and who they were, I either did what they wanted or they would kill me. You cannot know their secret and just go. Once you know, you have to be part of them or they would just get rid of you. I was afraid for my life.” They said now I knew what they were and who they were, either I did what they wanted or they would kill me Mohammed Zakariyya When he was caught by the police, he told the officers what they wanted to know. “And, now the security forces have arrested me, I have pledged to assist them. Even as it is now, I’m in trouble. If they get me, I’m a dead man.” Zakariyya’s voice was very faint. He looked very small. Boko Haram’s violent network across Borno, Adamawa and Yobe went largely unchecked by the military. The group became bolder and began attacking towns in large fighting groups, travelling in convoys of stolen Toyota Hiluxes. Its tactic was to arrive in a town and announce itself at the mosque. After members of the group rounded up everyone they could, they would announce that the young men could either join them, or die. In February 2014, 59 young boys were lined up outside their school dormitory and murdered, their bodies thrown on a fire. In March 2014 Boko Haram attacked the Giwa barracks in Maiduguri. In a video, men can be seen advancing on the military base, in the suburbs of a state capital under emergency rule. The fighters, many of whom are little more than boys, made almost no attempt to seek cover during their advance. When they broke in, they freed 800 people from the cells. Among the prisoners were people who were not members of Boko Haram before they had been picked up by the military. These people now faced a choice: they could not stay in prison, as they would surely die there. If they left and struck out on their own they risked being recaptured. Or they could leave with the group who had just liberated them. a a week (£10). Now 22, he said that he had two wives, and two children. He was struggling to feed his family when the men from Boko Haram offered to pay him to smuggle weapons. “They promised me 200,000 naira,” he said, “but on the first trip they only paid me 70,000 and on the second trip they gave me only 40,000. I was never in favour of their ideology. They threatened me and said that now I knew what they were and who they were, I either did what they wanted or they would kill me. You cannot know their secret and just go. Once you know, you have to be part of them or they would just get rid of you. I was afraid for my life.” They said now I knew what they were and who they were, either I did what they wanted or they would kill me Mohammed Zakariyya When he was caught by the police, he told the officers what they wanted to know. “And, now the security forces have arrested me, I have pledged to assist them. Even as it is now, I’m in trouble. If they get me, I’m a dead man.” Zakariyya’s voice was very faint. He looked very small. Boko Haram’s violent network across Borno, Adamawa and Yobe went largely unchecked by the military. The group became bolder and began attacking towns in large fighting groups, travelling in convoys of stolen Toyota Hiluxes. Its tactic was to arrive in a town and announce itself at the mosque. After members of the group rounded up everyone they could, they would announce that the young men could either join them, or die. In February 2014, 59 young boys were lined up outside their school dormitory and murdered, their bodies thrown on a fire. In March 2014 Boko Haram attacked the Giwa barracks in Maiduguri. In a video, men can be seen advancing on the military base, in the suburbs of a state capital under emergency rule. The fighters, many of whom are little more than boys, made almost no attempt to seek cover during their advance. When they broke in, they freed 800 people from the cells. Among the prisoners were people who were not members of Boko Haram before they had been picked up by the military. These people now faced a choice: they could not stay in prison, as they would surely die there. If they left and struck out on their own they risked being recaptured. Or they could leave with the group who had just liberated them. The fate that met those who did not go with Boko Haram was discovered by Amnesty International: 645 people who refused join the militants were rounded up and executed, then dumped in a mass grave. For many, like Zakariyya, it must have seemed that their destiny was to join Boko Haram or die. After our encounter with Zakariyya, my colleague and I stood outside the police station. We were both badly shaken. “They’re going to kill that boy aren’t they?” I asked. Kaura nodded. • This article is adapted from Andrew Walker’s new book, Eat the Heart of the Infidel (Hurst After our encounter with Zakariyya, my colleague and I stood outside the police station. We were both badly shaken. “They’re going to kill that boy aren’t they?” I asked. Kaura nodded. • This article is adapted from Andrew Walker’s new book, Eat the Heart of the Infidel (Hurs

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Major differences between ‘The Rich’ and ‘The Poor’ Risk and Right attitude to work to life are major hallmark of success. Everybody wants to be rich, but most of them remain poor after so many years of wanting the good things of life. Wonder why this is so? It’s simple! Choices and decisions the difference between a rich man and a poor man is their decisions. Whatever we do today determines our tomorrow, and that is why rich people are very careful what they say, where they go to and what they do. The principle of sowing and reaping can not be underestimated. Rich people usually put back a reasonable amount of money into reproduction, knowing that it will yield more in a matter of time. But this is not so for the poor, who wouldn’t risk saving the little they have. Poor people prefer to attend to their immediate need with the hope that tomorrow will take care of itself. They eat up everything and wait on a miracle to happen faith without works is nothing.Now don’t get me wrong. There is nothing bad with thinking big and out of the box. What is not right about this is not having what it takes to pull off a great idea. Rather than set unrealistic goals, the rich know their strengths and attempt goals that they can achieve within a specific time frame. The rich are in control of their lives and take the bull by the horn rather than wait on chance or luck. On the other hand, poor people usually give excuses for their failure and blame anyone and everyone for their situation. When you leave life to chance you would only get what life tosses to you and that would not help you or your career amount to anything.In any business and life path, challenges will always arise, but the ability to ride over these challenges without getting caught up is what makes a rich man different from a poor man. Poor people like to see mountains as unmovable and often times they do believe that most things are impossible.Often times, When a kid tells his poor parents that he wants to be a billionaire they laugh at him, not because they do not want a rich kid but they do not see the possibilities of that happening. Also, poor people only see just a few meters while rich people see through an idea till it is successful. If you desire to create a better life like the rich, its time to think big and create the abundance lifestyle for yourself and people around you If you’re not committed to being rich, you can never be rich. When you say you want to be rich, but do nothing about it, you will remain poor. They hope to be great but trend with low lives and do nothing about improving their livelihood. This is the mentality of poor people. They will just think about how good it is going to be if they are rich, but they will never do anything about their dreams. Successful people are committed toward their dreams and they go extra miles to achieve their goals. Strategic spending is one good way to save money and most rich people practice this often, irrespective of the fact that they have all the money to buy the world. Poor people buy anything they want as long as they have the cash at hand to get it. Life is a risk already, so why slow down on taking more risks that could land you in a better place? I’m not saying you shouldn’t think carefully before venturing into a business or something, but do not get shaken by the negative vibes you get and decide to play safe – that’s exactly what poor people do. Do you have any rich friends? Or all of your friends are poor? I’m not suggesting that you need to stop making friends with poor people, but like you know, birds of a feather flock together. So if you want to be rich, go get yourself some rich friends. One of the fastest ways to gain financially abundance is to learn directly from people who have already achieved this status. And if you’re not willing to learn, you will never be successful. So don’t take the poor man’s stand on this topic, upgrade your brain database and you will find wealth someday in some information that you would stumble upon.Some people are so afraid that they will lose their money and they form a mindset that blocks their creativity. They formed the mindset of ‘investing not to lose the money’. However, rich and successful people know exactly how they need to think in order to win the game of money. They will think and act from the view of playing the game to win. Unlike poor people, they are not always afraid of failure.

Amazing Life Tips that will Change How You Live

Amazing Life Tips that will Change How You Live

WHY WE ALL JUST CAN'T GET ALONG Our Giant Africa Country political polarization is driven more by incorrect beliefs and stereotypes about the other side, other ethnic groups than distaste with those people. That should be good news for those wondering how to knit polarized sides together, or at least nudge them toward compromise. Incorrect beliefs are easier to overcome than an ingrained lack of trust. However, as the writer later demonstrate, even that remedy may prove hard to achieve If it seems we are a nation of opposites more than ever, we are. According to a Pew Research Center report in 2014, political polarization of the American public has increased, and partisan antagonism is "deeper and more extensive than at any point in the last two decades." same experience existing in the nigeria state “When we look at people’s political identities, we know there is huge polarization in Nigeria” . But a fundamental question is, are these being driven by what economists would call taste—‘I like yoruba people and don’t like green ibo or hausa’—or is it driven by beliefs—‘it’s not that I don’t like them per se, I just don’t think we can trust them.’ Those are two completely different reasons that observationally result in the same thing—‘I don’t trust them’—but has very different policy implications and takeaways for practitioners.” the overarching issue is what leads people to trust one group over another, which has implications for business, socio cultural existence as well as the political arena. “my view is that it really seems that it’s actually beliefs that drive trust, not taste. That’s actually good news because it’s harder to change people’s taste preferences than it is beliefs,” The idea is the more we can have trusting transactions and relationships and exchanges, that’s going to be better for everyone. This is my little view.....

Fani-Kayode recounts 1966 Coup: Samuel Ladoke Akintola Femi Fani-Kayode, who is the son of then Deputy Premier of the South West, Remi Fani-Kayode, revealed how his father was arrested, and the subsequent murder of the Premier, Chief Samuel Ladoke Akintola in an interview with Leadership. He said: “What I witnessed that night was traumatic and devastating for me and my family and, of course, what the nation witnessed that night was horrific. It was a night of blood, terror and sadness. The events of that night set in motion a series of events which changed our history. The consequences of the events of that night are still with us till this day. So, it was not a good night; it was a sad and terrible night; one of blood and slaughter. “What I saw, what I witnessed was this; in the middle of the night, my mother came into the room which I shared with my older brother, Rotimi and my sister Toyin. I was six at the time. The lights had been cut, so all we could see was lights from vehicles. At that time, my father was deputy premier of the South West so; the official residence had a very long drive. We saw two headlights and heard the engines of two lorries drive up the drive-way. The occupants of the lorries stormed our home and my father went out to meet them, after he had called us and explained that he would explain their coming later. He explained that he would rather go out to meet them than let them come into the house. “The minute he stepped out, they brutalised him. I witnessed this. They tied him up and threw him into the lorry. Interestingly, the first thing they said to him was “where are your thugs now?” My father’s response was “I don’t have thugs, only gentlemen.” I think this made them brutalise him even more. They threw him in the back of the lorry, tied him up and, then stormed the house. “When they got into the house, they ransacked every nook and cranny, shooting into the ceiling and wardrobes. They were very brutal and frightful and we were terrified. My mother was screaming from the balcony because all she could do was focus on her husband, who was downstairs. ““Don’t kill him, don’t kill him!!” she kept screaming at them. I can still visualise this and hear her voice pleading, screaming and crying. I didn’t know where my brother or sister was; the house was in total chaos. A six-year-old, I was standing there in the middle of the house, surrounded by uniformed men who were ransacking the house and terrorising my family. “Something extraordinary happened. All of a sudden, one of the soldiers came up to me, put his hand on my head and said: “Don’t worry, we won’t kill your father, stop crying.” He said this thrice. After he said it the third time, I stopped crying. I went rushing to my mum who was still on the balcony and told her to stop crying because the soldier had promised that they would not kill my father, that everything would be okay. “I held on to the words of that soldier. That night, I never cried again. They took him away and as the lorry drove away, my mother kept on wailing and so was everyone in the house. “From there, they went to the home of Chief S.L Akintola, who was the premier. When they got there, unfortunately, my mother had phoned Akintola to inform him of what was happening. Akintola had calmed her, assuring that all will be well. When they got to Akintola’s house, he already knew of their coming so instead of coming out, the minute they got there, he called out some of his boys and they came firing with their guns. A gun battle ensued and the plan was delayed. They thought they could pick my father, pick Akintola and go kill them were they deemed fit. “Akintola wounded two of the soldiers who came and, when his ammunition ran out from inside the house, he came out with a white handkerchief and surrendered. The minute he stepped out, they just slaughtered him, right in front of my father. After they killed him, they moved on with my father to Lagos. When they got there, they went to the Officer’s Mess at Dodan Barracks.”